


Fourteen Days

by Altonym



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Chantry Issues, Dictatorship, Gen, The Chantry (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:53:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28310445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altonym/pseuds/Altonym
Summary: The reddest of red Hawkes pulls a team nobody and silences both the mages and the templars, seizing power in a brutal coup with the help of the city guard in her pocket. What does that mean for the ordinary people of Kirkwall?
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	Fourteen Days

**Day 1**

“Proof?” Llani laughed hoarsely, her hand jabbing like a blade, palm flat, as it always did when she had something to say. Her other hand held a knife, and as she spoke her jabbing hand reached for another potato to peel. 

“Pick any village outside Kirkwall! Anywhere where the Chantries look like forts, because nothing else was ever gonna protect you. Talk to the Revered Mother in any of those places and in half an hour you realise they’re either helpless or callous. Fuck, Hila, you did mission work! You were in Lodworth with me, you saw th-”  
  
“I know!” said Hila, her voice rising, “and I’ve joined the club, haven’t I? I just - I think you’re being too general. If you say there’s not one Mother you’ve lived under that inspired you-”  
  
“Of course,” Llani replied, testily, “of course there was. My point isn’t that they are bad people, or that I’m good. It’s…” she gave an irritable sound, and broke off.  
  
“It’s that you can’t do good in a bad institution.” Llani had shifted low in her stance, pushing herself back from the table a little. It was conspiratorial, like all their conversations along this theme. “And I mean, any institution that lets people like Petrice gain power…”  
  
“She was stopped, though.” Hila had dug herself in. It wasn’t that she was a doubter, not really; Hila was one of the reliable Sisters, the ones who got all the actual work done. She was easy to underestimate. It was she who’d done so much of their recruiting, if you could even call it that. They were just a group of friends. The young and the disrespected of the Chantry, meeting to grouse.  
  
“She was stopped,” Llani conceded, “and if I thought Elthina was a Petrice I would’ve left by now.”  
  
“So there’s hope,” Hila said.  
  
“C’mon. Everyone knows the vocation shouldn’t be like this.” Llani was staring down at her potato mutinously, squinting in the half-light. They’d left dinner prep late to go down to the waterfront, which meant peeling by candlelight. There were nearly ninety sisters in this cloister, a single regiment of the clergy, which added up to a small mountain of potatoes.  
  
“I know it shouldn’t,” Hila said, and got to her feet, heaving another sack over to her side. She’d moved through her last at about double Llani’s speed. That was how you could mark out the real peasant sisters. Llani felt a slight pang of envy - of guilt.

“Templars shouldn’t be ruling things,” Hila said, in her gentle voice, and her simple sincerity made it feel axiomatic, a fundamental rule of the cosmos. “There’s…” she faltered, cleared her throat. “There’s no mission to any of this. It’s power, and paranoia.”  
  
“It all is!” Llani said loudly, barely restraining herself. “Meredith’s one templar, but it’s all like this, right the way to Orlais. We keep skirting around it because we’re scared, but…”  
  
“I know,” Hila said, softly.  
  
“Madness, watching broke old women spill money in Lodworth’s battered little chanterbox to get sent off to Justinia,” Llani said, fervently.  
  
“ _Llani_ .”  
  
“I know, I know, save it for the pub.” That was her problem, see. Mouthy. There was a little pause, and Llani glanced over, attempting a grin. “I’m sorry. If I keep preaching at you, I’ll unconvert you.”  
  
Hila grinned back. “Never.”  
  
The room was drenched in blood-red light. 

There was a moment of total confusion. Hila’s face was a grotesque masquerade role, a mask thrown into relief. An awful sound chased the red light, a deafening boom with the roll of thunder below it. They froze in place ridiculously, holding their potatoes.

It felt like they couldn’t move, not while that awful light pinned them to the spot. It seemed to last minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than seconds. It wasn’t until Hila’s face was normal again that Llani stirred.  
  
There was a sound in the wake - Llani didn’t know if it was the ringing in her own ears, or a new sound. More thuds, creaking low sounds, booms. Screams, distant.  
  
Hila moved faster than her, shifting toward the window, and Llani heard the catch of breath, the whispered oath.  
  
“Llani,” she said, hoarsely. “The Chantry’s gone.”  
  
  


  
  
  


**Day 4**

  
  
On any other day like this, Siobhan should have turned the corner of The Seagull and felt the presence of the city hit her like the heat from an oven. She’d make a languid turn onto Potters' Lane, and the smell of wet clay would fill her senses, rich and dull, tamping down the stench of the tanners a couple of streets over. She’d turn left, and wander through the bakeries. Besides the smells, they were the safest streets, full of useful witnesses whose crafts began early in the morning, women who looked to make sure she got to the end of the row. 

Instead, she tiptoed through a tomb.

The fighting hadn’t even reached this far; most of the damage was localised around the Gallows and Chantry, with anything else the result of copycat looting or opportunists taking advantage of the chaos. The yellow sandstone that dominated Kirkwall tended to wash together, bland and beige except for where the houseproud had daubed their walls in white or, if they were feeling fancy, commissioned a mural. Now she saw slashes of red blood, hollowed out shopfronts. It was lucky that Kirkwall was carved rather than built, or it would have burned to a crisp.  
  
All that beige, coupled with nobody on the streets, left a heavy silence. She reflexively went to stroke Eolund behind the ear, and he snorted gently. That calmed her; the donkey, at least, had barely noticed anything. She tried to focus on the sound of her cart. She felt watched.  
  
She would have preferred not to make this journey at all, but they couldn’t afford to miss a major market day. The rumour was that any merchant brave enough to set up stall was selling out their wares within a few hours. She'd stay near the guards with Eolund, wait for their late patrol back past the potteries towards Little Ferelden, and tag along to keep safe.  
  
The Fereldans had rebounded faster than most; she supposed they had the most experience with war. Like everyone else, they had retreated after the explosions, not just from the Chantry but from the ongoing street battles, many of which had devolved into magic or open melée. The barricades had gone up at both ends of Yeoman's Way, manned by the most belligerent and tipsy militiamen the Fereldan population had to offer. Siobhan had never thought much of the neighbourhood lads, half out-of-work, half in gangs, until she watched her brother Seamus lounging with them on their makeshift battlements, swaggering with feigned confidence, brandishing bows last fired during the Blight. She'd stayed by Dad's bed, telling all her best ‘Orlesian walks into a bar’ jokes so he’d wheeze out a laugh loud enough to distract her from the distant thuds, the yelling, the screams.  
  
The next morning, she'd crept out into the street to see if any of the barrow boys were out; they weren't. It was mostly women, testing the waters, armed. They gave each other cautious nods, swapped news, eyed the end of the streets. The battlements were still manned, but it was obviously just precaution. The fighting had died down, and the improvised scaffolds were dismantled a few hours later when the guard swept through the area. She bummed an orange off of Yara across the street and split it between the three of them at home - for morale.  
  
Within a couple of days, Little Ferelden was achieving a new normal - tense, yes, but held together. She realised that almost everyone who had wound up in Kirkwall had done so because of the Blight. What was civil war next to darkspawn? 

Outside of the close-knit enclaves of the immigrant communities, though, Kirkwall was silent. Siobhan couldn't remember a time like this since the Qunari insurrection, and that had been a flash in the pan, over before it began. This felt bigger somehow, all-encompassing.  
  
She focused her thoughts on the trundle of the cart, the little grunts Eolund made as he trotted. She kept her eyes up and around, a hand on her dagger. Her hope was that everyone was avoiding her as much as she was avoiding them. She wondered how long the city could go on like this. People would starve if the bakeries didn't reopen soon, if the gears just ground to a halt.  
  
She'd just have to not be one of them. Leaving the city was out of the question - dad couldn't travel - so she'd have to be lucky. They'd never have gotten here in the first place if not for natural luck, and thus she was grimly optimistic.  
  
She neared the market square and their spot, just over from the Guildhall. The cured fish was Seamus' catch - Siobhan made it into something preservable, saleable. He was one of few Fereldans with Kirkwall fishing licenses, and between his fees, stall fees and the cost of the curing salt, they had a razor-thin profit margin. She would do good business today, though. She wasn't above a bit of gouging.  
  
As she approached the market, a sound in the faint periphery of her hearing slowly resolved itself into a great mass of voices, all sounding together, somewhere west of her near where the wagonmakers kept their workshops. That Chant had been going on since the explosion, the Walking Chant, so-called because the chanters moved about the city, wailing for Kirkwall's sins. They had not yet walked through Little Ferelden, though, and Siobhan doubted they would. She quickened her pace in slight irritation, tugging at Eolund’s collar.

She knew, of course, what she'd find when she arrived. The news had spread through the city rapidly, but since it was more foreboding than salacious, it was murmured rather than gossipped.  
  
The Viscountess' troops had set up a great gallows. It was in the dead centre of the trading square, directly in front of a pile of rubble which had once been a statue of the first Viscount. Most of the buildings around the square had been severely damaged or completely razed, since they were only a couple of blocks from the explosion, and there were a few alleys still completely buried in debris. It was bizarre, seeing the skyline naked of those high spires. Without the Chantry's shadow, the square felt as exposed and vulnerable as the city itself.  
  
Eolund found their spot automatically, grumbling idly as he settled. It was a good thing too, because Siobhan had gone a little numb. She had vague childhood Blight-memories of seeing human bodies, but they were just-killed, still possessing some lingering ember of life. The ones she saw now were clean kills, the cold dead. The adrenaline of flight was a different feeling entirely to the grim economy of Hawke's purge.  
  
Carts had been arranged so that when the machinery had finished its work, the bodies could be directly dumped into them. Once the cart filled, it would take away an entire batch at once. According to Yara, the executed were being taken to temporary crematoria set up within the Gallows themselves. The crematoria were kept going by mages, so she'd heard, which meant the Circle had not been completely annulled. She knew Patrick was full of shit.  
  
A man in Kirkwall livery began to speak. She set up her stall slowly, inefficiently, her attention half taken up by the spectacle before her. The smell of her unpacked salt fish thankfully overwhelmed the smell, wafting from the carts, of those who had defecated during their execution.  
  
"Templar Jacques Mérrard, found guilty of abuse of power and lyrium smuggling. Templar Yael Emerson, found guilty of abetting the attempted-coup of the former Knight-Commander Meredith. Templar Astrid Markley, found guilty of abetting the attempted-coup of the former Knight-Commander Meredith, and of abuse of power." Siobhan pretended not to watch as the three condemned, dressed in the moon-sigil garb of the penitent sinner, were walked up onto the gallows.  
  
It was strange as well, to see Meredith's private army supplanted with this new one. The guardsmen had officially pledged their loyalty to Viscountess Hawke, just after it became clear she was the sole remaining claimant to authority in Kirkwall. Their armour seemed thicker, shinier now - perhaps it was power doing that. Siobhan had not seen a templar in days before now, though the word was that not all of them had been purged either, that some had been absorbed into the guard or exiled or forgiven. Like the Circle, they had suddenly disappeared from city life, but unlike the Circle, their executions were public.  
  
She felt like she had seen these men and women; in their last minutes, they were archetypes, hardly people. She could imagine Yael especially, those long curls bound behind her head, plate armour instead of this thin penitents' cloth. A sword at her side, a shield on her back. Siobhan did not feel vindicated. 

The audience that had gathered to watch was small - she noticed a group of kids, no doubt drawn by the taboo. She wondered distantly why nobody was shielding them from this - where were their parents? Kirkwall had become too used to this.  
  
There was a delay as the soldiers murmured to one another; one of the nooses was hanging a little oddly, the ropework out of place. Siobhan watched Yael realise she had been given perhaps twenty extra seconds to live. A flicker in her face, despair, frustration. _Just get it over with_ . An empty cart rolled in from the west entrance of the trading square, and Siobhan realised with a jolt that it represented another dozen lives.  
  
Everybody knew the templars were dictatorial arseholes. Siobhan was more scared of them than she'd ever been of mages, whose lives were lived somewhere else, somewhere quasi-mythical. Nevertheless, she didn’t feel much satisfaction. These executions had been going on since about a day after the coup, since after the templars submitted to the Viscountess. She had announced punishment, justice, reconciliation. She had offered the people of Kirkwall the blood they had been baying for, had gazed upon the squabbling factions of this city and found them all wanting.  
  
The gallow-rope was secure, and the soldiers prepared to slip Jacques' head through the noose. Siobhan averted her gaze, and focused on arranging the fish.

  
  
  
**Day 6**

  
  
The throne of Kirkwall, so they said, was haunted.  
  
In truth, not much of Kirkwall had been spared historical curse; it was a city which had always been at the fringes of empire, and such places are where abuses occur. One of the wells near the eastern gate was said to give forth blood when operated by an adulterer, which brought many a feuding couple to set the record straight. There was a dockyard crane which by tradition was never allowed to rest facing the Gull & Rope nearby - this would ensure the destruction of that day’s goods. Remi himself had once heard the tale of a possessed ear-spoon which, when utilised by an Orlesian, would inevitably burrow its way through the eardrum and directly into the brain.

The violent death which had supposedly infected Kirkwall’s highest chair was that of Terence II, Viscount during the Divine Age. The story went that he was stabbed through the back panel by his own bodyguard, then guillotined, his severed head paraded through the streets on an embroidered cushion to public rejoicing.  
  
Remi doubted this; it had not exactly been a commoners’ revolt. Terence had been usurped by a noble competitor, Percival, who promptly sacked the entire viscountal bodyguard corps (not an idiot, then) and created the City Guard, a quintessentially proletarian organisation which, in theory, was immune to the whim of nobility and thus less likely to assassinate him. It was intended from the outset to have its own internal political culture, choose its own leaders, and had long been one of the only routes to power in Kirkwall for those born outside Hightown.  
  
Perhaps it was justice, then, that the City Guard should now become arbiters of the city’s fate. Remi had watched from Father’s old balcony as they swept through the Rue Lamarches and Girondes, arresting nobles that had too obviously supported Meredith’s coup. No information was coming readily from the Keep, but the rumour was exile at a minimum. The Viscountess had good reason to choose exile for nobility – it created no martyrs, allowed her to eject entire families at once, and provided pretext for confiscating wealth en masse. Whatever government was going to stagger out of this mess desperately needed coin.  
  
He was surprised, therefore, to receive not an arrest but a summons – a call to the Keep, by order of the Viscountess. He could not refuse, of course, for he was technically still part of the Kirkwall Office Of Stewardship, even if he had not attended since the night the purges began. To refuse was civil desertion, punishable by, as it happened, exile.

“Don’t attend,” said his mother, pacing in front of the fire. “We’ll get you out of the city. I still have friends in Val Royeaux, and you speak excellent Orlesian. I’m sure I can find you a position there-”  
“ Mother -”  
“ I’m serious. We get you out with one of the smugglers, maybe even by boat? Oh, but you hate to sail...maybe just to Emersham?-”  
“Mother -”  
“ Then Ferelden, your aunt in Denerim. She owes me, I’ll-”  
“ Mother.” Evidently he had found the right gravity to his tone, for she was suddenly quiet.  
  


“I’m going,” he said, after a moment. “I think the Viscountess has run out of people to kill. She’s realised there’s a city to run. They’re demanding my presence because they need administrators, not more victims.”

His mother eyed him carefully; she worried, but she took on what he’d said. They had been alone together too long for her to ignore him. “You think you’re being included in government? That’s a risky bet.”  
  
He shrugged. “So is trying to flee.”

  
***

  
The Keep was much busier than Remi had expected. At first he thought that perhaps his colleagues had been less work-shy than himself, but most of the faces were new, gaunt. Guardsmen had replaced the templars, and Viscountess Hawke had fortified the internal space with ugly, incongruous metal battlements, as though expecting assault. Not unwise, given this city’s recent past.  
  
The cavernous foyer was packed, organised at the point of a sword into bulging streams of petitioners and minor officials, then subdivided based on urgency. Evidently, credentials earned before the coup were meaningless. There was a sense of ruffled elegance to those congregated here, nobility wearing sour, impatient expressions, tutting and sighing. Remi surmised they had rarely queued before.  
  
He joined the much quicker-flowing stream of those with formal summons. There was damage even here; one wall had been burned clean, the stonework exposed, and over it Hawke’s men had hammered in enormous posterboards with duty rosters. The whole place seemed more armed than before, more militarised. For the first time in his life, Remi perceived it as a true Keep.  
  
“ Remi? Eh, Remi?” He blinked out of his distraction and looked around for his name – he found it with a short, round-faced blonde woman wearing judicial robes, who was calling from one of the makeshift stands along the south wall.  
“Helen!”

She was beckoning to him, so he slipped out of his queue to more tutting and cut through another, until she was looming over him from her docket.

“They gave me petty judicial powers,” she said, all at once proud and sheepish, and from this close he could see how tired she was. A week ago she had been a clerk shuffling papers for the Office of Property, just as junior as him. She clearly read his face, for she added, “Yeah, I know, mental.”  
  
“ Where are the justices?” he asked, grateful to be relying on something more than his intuition.  
  
“Purged,” she said cheerfully. “At least five of them are gone; the only one left in Property is Richelieu. I’ve spent the last three days adjudicating squatter’s rights here, so I don’t know what’s going on higher up.” She gave him a significant look. “You’ll know about that kind of thing soon enough, though.”

“What d’you mean?” he asked, distracted; a fight had broken out in another queue, and he was watching the guardsmen clear the section out - not gently, either.  
  
“Stewardship got gutted, everyone above Davies.” She had shifted a little in her seat and was cracking out her bones – he glanced back.

“I’m not _completely_ certain,” she said, “but if I remember my precedence correctly, you’re now the First Steward of Kirkwall.”  
  
Ten minutes later, dazed and slightly nauseated, Remi drifted across the security line and into high office.

  
  
  
**Day 9**

  
“ _The sky grew dark. And the ground began to tremble as if in mortal dread._

_The crowd before the gates, both Tevinter and faithful, fell silent._

_The heavens wept, and yet no rain could extinguish the flame_

_which was now a funeral pyre. Wind swept across the city_

_like a terrible hand in rage. And the Tevinters who witnessed this_

_said: "Truly, the gods are angered."_

_In sorrow, the crowds dispersed. The army of the faithful_

_turned southward, to the lands from which they had come.”_

They had walked the Chant for the better part of the morning, and Llani found herself shifting in and out of focus, her voice intoning the words even when her mind wandered. For her, the lyrics were close to involuntary, so thoroughly learned that they were as much music as text. They had been a drumbeat running through her life since she was an oblate, the rhythm beneath her stride.  
  
It seemed impossible that it was less than a week since the Walkers began. She felt as though she had spent months pacing these streets, the high winds of autumn beating at her face. Each evening she returned to their half-ruined cloisters, her legs so sore that they radiated heat, and bound a few more blisters. In a perverse way, it was the happiest she had ever been. She felt an absoluteness of purpose.

  
They did not keep to a single route, but decided by whim and by vote of the assembled crowd where to roam. They followed the hours of the Chantry – the nine daily stations of the Chant. The size of their group kept them safe, even when they were jeered or mocked. Many in Kirkwall had stopped believing, and a fair number more had turned to the Qun. But still they walked.  
  
The people who joined their walk varied enormously, and came from across the social spectrum of Kirkwall. Something in the spontaneity and mourning character of the Walkers resisted easy cynicism and drew in even the odd irreligious or heretic. Most could not read, so the Chant was instructed to the crowd, each line called and then responded.

It helped that they handed out food, that they were doing the good works. People who were starving before, starving now, flocked from out of their alleys to watch and to listen. Llani didn’t delude herself that they believed - she knew it was just a distraction. But they could persuade, when they had people’s attention. It was a start.  
  
The romantic in Llani imagined that this was how it was at the beginning, when Andraste gathered her clans and called her Exalted March. She skirted nervously around the unspeakable arrogance at the centre of her conviction – that what was happening here was _big_ , that it constituted a change, that the message they had surreptitiously circulated among themselves could explode like wildfire.

All they had to do was keep chanting.

  
  


**Day 10**

Nobody ever came into the First Steward’s office unless there was a problem to solve, and so these days it was never empty. The previous First Steward, who had ruled from this frigid little box for almost fifty years, had seen fit to keep Kirkwall’s finances a state secret, even to members of the Stewardship. At the time, Remi had thought it was patrician arrogance, or else pride of office. Now he was beginning to think the decrepit old bastard had been protecting them.

He’d known Kirkwall would be broke. The expropriation currently taking place in Hightown would provide an income, for a bit, and Remi was knowledgeable enough to be sparing with it, but it was by its very nature only a one-off windfall, and more dangerously it eroded the city’s long-term tax base. Kirkwall had few natural resources remaining, its mines in use since the Imperium and close to being completely exhausted. On top of that, Kirkwall’s emerging role had been, like much of the Free Marches, as a neutral entrepot between Tevinter and the south. Such entrepots only thrived when they were stable, and Kirkwall had hardly been a beacon of even governance in the last decade or so.

So he had expected broke - he had not expected this much debt. For all her faults, Remi had thought he could admire Meredith’s discipline - but as he was discovering, she had massively inflated the city tithe for the Templar Order and siphoned enormous resources towards a project that neither his treasury records, nor the office of the Viscountess, seemed willing or able to elaborate upon. It involved mining operations, rent of large estates, the employment of metalworkers and stonecutters, and it outspent the judiciary six-to-one. To pay for the project, Meredith had strongarmed Kirkwall’s puppet government into taking loans from the other Marcher States and even from private merchants. 

He would've considered a catatonic panic, except that somebody was asking for his input every seven seconds. It was an exquisite fraud, telling subordinates to squeeze a few extra coppers out of a road repair budget when the size of Kirkwall’s debt was so genuinely ludicrous. It dwarfed everything, pressed in on his thoughts, and he found himself so preoccupied that his mother had started watching him with the same air of nervousness as when he first started having Matthew over.

So what does one do with a ludicrous problem? One finds a ludicrous solution, and then one invites the most ludicrous person one can think of to help.  
  
“How would it work?” asked Viscountess Hawke.

Remi’s eyes flickered to meet hers. There was conviction there, sledgehammer force. To his own astonishment, he found himself grinning.

“Well,” he said, swallowing. “You refuse to pay.”

The Viscountess said nothing. He could see the cogs beginning to whir inside her head, and felt the distinct urge to step backwards. 

“You contest the legitimacy of the debt.” he added, because he was not a man who was at ease with silence. “If we claim Meredith was compromised, or committing treason, or both, then the debts were fraudulent. Nobody can hold us to them.” He paused. “I mean, which is total bollocks, but that’s what we’ll say.”

“Why would they accept that?” she asked. She was watching him closely. 

Remi debated how to answer this question. Up to now, all of the Viscountess’ many questions had been submitted in writing, since she spent most of her time in her show trials. Remi dissected her questions and took the due number of hours to respond. Having her stood in front of him made that significantly more difficult, even with a suitably official heavy oak desk between them. He decided, after a few seconds, that a blunt woman deserved a blunt answer.  
  
“They won’t accept it,” he said, and finally met her gaze. “We are betting that they will decide the cost of enforcing the debt - namely, war with you and all the concomitant expenditure - will exceed the value of the reclaimed money. We call their bluff, basically.”  
  
There was a long silence, in which she stared him down. For a brief moment he had an utterly clear image of his own head bouncing off the cobblestones in the Highmarket.

“Right,” said the Viscountess. “Draft the letter.” 

**Day 12** ****

Lemnat had always been a coward.  
  
The boys he grew up with had been hardened by their misery - the Alienage was so abject that they became abject along with it, and were cruel to one another, and pounced on weakness. Better to punish fear than to admit it. Better to be the one beating than the one crying. Better to be among others than to be alone.  
  
Lemnat had never even tried to be that way. It was not out of a sense of superiority; he was simply sensitive, and wept easily, and the other boys knew so instinctively that it was his nature that he was bullied much less by them than one might expect. They left him at his mother’s hem, and said nothing to anyone when he began to heal their wounds, just by touching them. 

It is a strange irony of Kirkwall life that it is the most rejected and oppressed, the elves, among whom a mage is safest. Lemnat was sheltered by their secrecy, and his untrained gift was, like his nature, without violence. He talked to pigeons, and they flocked to him, and he could see through their eyes. He cured Ma Hathwen of her white fever, sort of just by being there. The stories all said that an untrained mage’s power will explode as he ages, and maybe that is true of boisterous boys with cuts on their knees, but Lemnat was no such boy.  
  
His nature did not change as he aged. So it was that when, during the great collapse of the Chantry, the templars swept through the Alienage, he did not fight them, or reveal himself. Instead, he watched his mother die, and most of the boys he’d grown up with, skewered on the swords of terrified, impotent men, their Order collapsing around them at the command of a madwoman. Some said there were apostates hiding in the Alienage. A rumour was enough to kill an elf for.  
  
Afterwards, Lemnat attended every Templar execution he could, a gaunt adolescent figure sheltering in the alcove of the Mint, and for the very first time in his life he took pleasure in another’s pain. Nobody had ever executed an elf-killer, not in his memory.  
  
He stayed in an empty, looted jewellers, and took food from the wandering sisters. When the Amnesty came out of the Gallows, he accepted the Viscountess’ summons. He wasn’t completely sure, but he thought he could probably kill for her.

**Day 14**

Llani’s Walkers rounded the Funerary Gate, and merged and bled into the mass of Walkers marching on the Square of Sorrows. They were here to chant, and to call for justice. She liked her group, tough and fiery like she was. She liked that some of the other Walking groups didn’t like hers, were offended by what they said of the Divine, of the Chantry. They gloried in their controversy, and were passionate, and knew they were telling harsh truths.

She pushed through the dense crowd, making her way to her place among the leaders at the front. She was taller than most women, and stood out as Rivaini, and they parted like wheat under wind before her.

It was an absurdity, just how much had changed in so little a time. Those first few days of exhaustion had given way to almost a straight week of awakening; Llani barely went back to the cloister anymore, so quickly had their following ballooned, so much work they had to do. A few of them had emerged as the speakers, those who consistently appeared, those that the followers came out to see. Llani had been pleased, but not surprised, that she was one of them.

The nameless arrogance in her had grown, and fed, and she stood prouder than she had. For years, she had talked the talk, and watched peasant sisters like Hila work twice as hard as her without complaint, and been forced to look her own hypocrisy in the eye. She was not an iconoclast at peace with just griping, as some of the other sisters had proven to be, slinking out of the city in ones and twos. She wanted to live her beliefs - hated herself when she did not. She loved Hila, but she did not love the mirror Hila held. Who could challenge her sincerity now? She was doing something, being something - living as Andraste lived.

For years, they had talked and talked; after dinners, after chants, secretive as is the nature of all closed societies. Chantries were the one place in this world that a woman was free of men - in a rural chantry without stewards, you could go a week without seeing a single one. Even the most venal Chantry sister understood that gift, and felt a sense of loyalty, if not to her sisters themselves, then to the institution, to the independence and specialness of their sorority.

She realised now that their secrecy, precious as it was, had been a handicap. They had been cloistered in chanterhouses and avoiding the masses. They had believed their heresy to be a quibble of ecclesiastical scholarship among sisters, not a movement that could garner support. Anti-clerical movements within the Chantry cropped up frequently, especially in times of upheaval, and the Chantry either crushed them or capitulated to them internally, a bloodless coup that changed little.  
  
This was the genius of the Chantry’s insistence on seclusion and intellectualisation – the righteous anger of clerics who wanted Chantry reform could be channelled into nothing more than strongly worded missives and academic debate. Central Chantries grew ever more fabulously wealthy and corrupt, local Chantries were unable to meaningfully alleviate the appalling poverty of their rural congregations, and nothing changed.  
  
Llani had grown up believing that the White Chantry existed to serve, and had watched Kirkwall’s religious elite dither over magical doctrine while half the city starved. She knew her books well enough to know the utter destruction wreaked on the Free Marches by the endless conflict between the White and Black Divines. She knew her ancestry well enough to know that there were other approaches to magic than repression and fear, that the syncretism of places like Rivain was not mere heresy, but old, very old.  
  
Those left to run the Kirkwall Chantry, her people, had decided to rebuild it. They had focused on poverty relief, immediate disaster aid, the many needs of a population ignored as Gwendolyn cracked down. They were reconnecting their service with the people; that meant shelter, food, a place to grieve, a place to leave children supervised. Every Chantry in the city was currently full of the needy. Llani’s young collective were fanatics, and their focus had become total.  
  
It was her turn at the pulpit. Their Walking Chant was not just for singing – it was calling forth a new heterodoxy, advocating heresy. The rebel clerics had reasoned that there was no better place than a ruin to risk everything, and they had a simple, central, total demand at the heart of their theology. Llani was still unused to being a public figure, unused even to oratory, but she had found in these frantic days that her passionate, arrogant voice carried when she spoke. She intended to be listened to.  
  
She took the stump atop the steps of the Square of Sorrows, beneath the statue of Andraste herself. She pushed back her thick braids, stood tall, and addressed the crowd directly.  
  
“Corruption,” she called, “is familiar to Kirkwall. We have long lived with injustice as part of the air we breathe. Like a cancer, this corruption has spread throughout the White and Black Chantries, preoccupied with hierarchy, prestige and secular power. You have all seen this. We have seen this, and done nothing. Our mourning chant is our apology to you. The bread in your mouths is our apology to you.” She left a long pause; she and her fellow sisters stood before their folk.

“Andraste led her rebellion as a champion of the people, drawn from among them. She was not a Queen, but a Prophet. So too is the role of our ancient Chantry not rulership, but publication, the spread of the Chant, the service of the people and nothing else. A Chantry’s role is not to acquire wealth and hoard it, nor to shackle the magical, nor to unseat rightful rulership by force of arms. It is to Chant!”  
  
She got her roar of approval then, deafening, echoing off the stone bones of this city of death, and she grinned mirthlessly, a general before her troops. She had the rumbling, rolling cadence of the Chant itself, and she hit her stride, filling the square with her presence.  
  
“ Our demand is simple.” She let it hang. “An end to any Divine who claims succession from the Maker’s Bride, an end to hierarchical Chantry, an end to the tyrants who dictate to us from their towers in Minrathous and Val Royeaux.”  
  
They roared again. She let them roar.  
  


“W-” - they were still going, and she got even louder. “We reject them! We demand an Exalted March -” and she let that hang, suddenly stopped.  
  
“An Exalted March,” she repeated, “of the spirit. Of letters, of faith, of thinking!” She had gotten a little quieter. She was looking out at them all as she had looked at Hila so many evenings in kitchens and Chanterhouses and stables, with her whole being, her gravity. The whole square was silent for her. 

“We demand nothing short of the Chantry’s complete reformation.”

  
  



End file.
